A Study Of Deleuze’s Becoming-literature

This research paper tends to build a systematic framework of Deleuze’s literary thoughts, his thoughts on becoming literature, by scrutinizing and sorting out Delezue’s (and Guattari’s) works on literature. More importantly, becoming is the key theme of Deleuze’s thoughts, so his theory of becoming-literature is focused on constructing a new becoming passage and tries to give full play to its social function and political potential in its own special way and drive the innovations in literary creation and criticism.The text introduces the life of Deleuze and the development of his academic ideas, sketching the main points of his philosophy. What follows are how and why I choose this topic and what is going to be explored in this research, together with a literature review of the relevant studies both in domestic and abroad. Then we discusses the relationships between becoming and literature. It is found that becoming has the preference for contingency and innovations and other features such as anti-history and anti-representation. With language materials, literature has created blocks of sensation, and thus is made becoming by anti-representation and the accidental connection. The form of language is embodied in specific expressions and applications, which indicates that effective forms of expression are approved and supported by social power because social power is reflected and operated in those expression forms. Deleuze describes effective language expressions as the major language and points out that collective assemblage is constructed by this major language and its homogenous social layer. If humans expect to destroy steady social power, the only possible way is to start from the aspect of language, that is, break up the effective language expressions. To put it more specifically, another language should be made out of the strong language to generate confusion inside the strong language and thereby cause the collapse of its isomorphic stability, which will lead to another collective assemblage, a not-yet-emergent one but a would-be one in the future. This new language will not appear in public view in social space, but can find its place in literary space which is relatively free. Under this circumstance, a unique literary phenomenon, minor literature, is understood to be revolutionary and anti-representative.The we expound the relationships between becoming the other and literature. Becoming the other is the dual deconstruction and escape for the metaphysical subject and social identity, then some misunderstandings about becoming-the other have been clarified and further made it explicit that becoming the other does not mean simulation, identification, or evolution, but a kind of real phenomenon. There are three main types of becoming the other:becoming-animal, becoming-woman, and becoming-imperceptible. Becoming-animal in literary space is to demonstrate how humans mangle their subjectivity and make useful efforts to create new life forms. Becoming-woman aims to weaken and overthrow male-chauvinism-centered social orders in which two ways can be found. One is that in concrete situation, the isolation of the male subject has been cracked; the point is to overturn the authority of males and allow the life to show some characteristics of female. Another is that difference of becoming-woman will help women to generate the new type or image of women and thus escape from the rules and disciplines made for women by the male-centered society. The relationship between becoming-woman and literature is presented as such fact that feminists construct diversified woman images consciously in literary space to resist the androcentrism in the dimension of aesthetics. Next, other writers conduct the experiment of becoming-woman unconsciously to construct the unique female world in literary space, a space beyond the male vision. The creative writings of Chen ran and Can xue are taken as the example to probe the aesthetic world generated by female literature to discover the differences. The last part of this chapter is devoted to becoming-imperceptible and literature. Becoming-imperceptible is not how the subject explores and decodes the objective world but what the subject adds to the life and the world, that is, new ideas and vitality brought by a new way of becoming. All the conducts of becoming, in a sense, is becoming-imperceptible. On the one hand, literature becomes the new time mode; on the other hand, literature becomes animal and the woman. And then Stream of Consciousness Novels become the world of minute perception.The last chapter comes to a conclusion from two perspectives. The first part combs the development vein of Deleuze’s thought on becoming-literature and points out that identifying the basis of becoming is the precondition of the creation in becoming-literature. To find the passage of becoming and strategies is the key to the creation in becoming-literature. The three features of becoming-literature are summed up:becoming-literature does not have its own history; becoming-literature is a kind of untimely pragmatism literature; becoming-literature is found to be revolutionary.